After rejecting the “Three Temptations” (Mt 4:1-11; Lk 4:1-13)
Jesus cited Scripture to Satan: “You shall worship the Lord your God.” This
passage identifies only the Lord as God, in which case Satan is not a god. Satan
is not a god, yet Satan has a prominent role in the Gospels. Therefore,
understanding the nature of Satan is unlikely to tell us much about the divine,
but such understandings will likely yield profound insights into human culture
and human relationships.

Rev. Paul Nuechterlein notes
http://home.earthlink.net/~paulnue/core_convictions.htm that, if we do
not explain Satan in terms of human culture, we will gravitate towards one of
two dangerous tendencies. One is Manichaeism, which envisions the world gripped
between two divine, warring forces, one good and one evil, which fight for
pre-eminence. However, Jesus seemed to reject Satan having divine status. The
problem is that it is tempting to see the universal tensions between love and
destructiveness in our communities and in our own souls as part of a universal
war between God and the devil. Since we want to regard ourselves as “good” and
on God’s side, we may find it tempting to deny our own destructive desires by
projecting our own anger, hatred, and other malevolent sentiments onto other
individuals (people and animals). This, combined with the violent imagery (e.g.,
references to “war”), is a prescription for scapegoating.

Recall last week’s passage about how “the creation waits with
eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). The Apostle
Paul did not describe God intervening to rid the world of violence and
destructiveness. Rather, he wrote that the peacemaking sons of God will usher in
a new age. This accords with Ephesians 6:15, in which Paul instructed his
readers to resist the forces of evil “with the equipment of the gospel of
peace”.

The other dangerous tendency associated with Manichaeism is to
project violence and hatred onto God. This, Nuechterlein has argued, is a form
of idolatry (see part 12), in which people worship not the God of love but
rather a human-made God who is angry, violent, and dark. John warned against
this: “This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God
is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” (1 john 1:5)

Understanding Satan in terms of human culture involves
explaining violence and destructiveness not as divine attributes but as
consequences of human fallenness. We will explore this further next week.